Security under austerity is not about guarding everything. It is about honest prioritisation. A specialist on protecting the public estate when the money has gone.
Walk any council’s asset register and the scale of the problem is obvious. Leisure centres, libraries, depots, car parks, parks, public conveniences, community centres, civic offices, the odd closed school waiting for disposal. It is a sprawling, varied estate, much of it open to the public by design, and all of it a target for vandalism, arson, metal theft, fly-tipping and break-ins. Then look at the security budget, and the gap between the two is where the trouble lives.
The instinct is to try to cover everything a little. It is the wrong instinct, and it is the one the market will encourage, because a supplier is happy to quote for cameras on every site. Spread thin, that money protects nothing well. The honest starting point is to accept that you cannot protect every building equally, and to decide, deliberately, which ones matter most.
That decision is a triage, and it runs on two questions. How likely is something to happen here, and how bad is it if it does. A busy leisure centre with a pool full of children scores differently from a lock-up garage. A building full of copper and lead scores differently from an empty field. Rank the estate honestly against both, and the picture of where to spend, and where to accept a managed risk, becomes far clearer than any blanket policy.
With the priorities set, the cheapest work comes first, because it is nearly free and it is yours to do. Most crime against public buildings concentrates where there is poor visibility, easy access and a sense that nobody is looking after the place. Cut the sightlines clear, get the lighting working, control who can reach the back of the site, and clear damage and dumping quickly. A building that looks cared for is a harder target than one that looks abandoned, and none of that needs a procurement exercise.
Only then does technology earn its place, and only where the triage points. This is where budgets are wasted most. You do not need permanent cameras on every asset. You need good coverage on the few sites that carry the highest risk, and the ability to move resources to wherever the problem flares next. Wireless and redeployable systems have made that affordable in a way fixed cabling never did. A camera that can be moved to this month’s hotspot is worth more than ten bolted to sites that were quiet anyway.
The assets that catch councils out are almost always the empty ones. A decommissioned leisure centre or a closed school, left standing while the disposal grinds on, is often the single highest-risk building you own: no staff, no eyes, valuable metal in the roof and a standing invitation to arson. These need either real protection or a faster route to sale or demolition. Leaving them to drift is how a manageable liability becomes a six-figure fire.
Whatever you install, treat it as a source of evidence, not just deterrence. Councils do hold enforcement and cost-recovery powers, and footage that stands up is what turns them from theory into a fixed penalty, a prosecution or a bill sent to the people responsible. Share that intelligence with the police and with neighbouring authorities, because the same offenders rarely trouble just one patch.
There is more value here than any single authority can capture alone. The problem is rarely confined to your boundary, and neither is the answer. A community safety partnership that pools what it knows, a shared approach with the police, registered social landlords and the business improvement district in a town centre, and a joint framework that gets three authorities better value than one buying alone: these are the moves that stretch a thin budget furthest. Treating the estate as part of a place, rather than a set of isolated buildings, is usually where the real gains sit.
A word on the sales calls that follow any incident. After a fire or a spate of break-ins, the quotes arrive fast, and the pressure is to be seen to have acted. Resist buying to look busy. The question is never whether a system would help in the abstract. It is whether this spend, on this site, protects more than the same money spent somewhere higher up your list.
None of this is heroic, and that is the point. Protecting a shrinking estate on a shrinking budget is not about guarding everything. It is about knowing what you are protecting, spending where it counts, designing out the easy crime, and being honest about the risks you have chosen to carry. Done deliberately, that is a defensible strategy. Done by default, it is just a series of expensive surprises.
Simon Legrand is a physical security specialist and founder of Fyrfly Systems, which works with schools and the public sector.
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